That’s why what Elvia said... I can’t quite describe it, but it almost felt to me like some sort of forgiveness. Permission. You are you. You’re Ayasaki Hikaru, before you’re anything else. And that’s okay. That’s good. That was what it sounded like she was saying to me.
“And when I was fightin’ with Myusel and Her Majesty, you took my side, Hikaru-sama.”
“Well, I mean...”
Someone had to. Elvia had obviously been late to the battle for Shinichi-san’s affections. Frankly it kind of ticked me off—it made me feel a little bad for her—that she was the one who most obviously had real romantic feelings for Shinichi-san, was the most aware of him as a member of the opposite sex, and yet he hardly seemed to notice her.
In some ways, Elvia and I were polar opposites. She was all innocence, with no secrets—everything she thought came right out her mouth. She could be a little bit of a klutz at times, but she threw herself into everything she did. She knew exactly who she was. Or at least, she looked like it to me. I could almost be jealous.
“Maybe it ain’t a werewolf’s place to say this, but...” Elvia smiled, almost shyly. “You’re a real important friend to me, Hikaru-sama.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.
“There, all clean,” she said, rinsing the last of the bubbles from my body.
“Thank you, Elvia,” I said. And then I thought, if I were still in my male body, we would never have had the chance to talk like this. So, hey. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing, this turning into a girl. I smiled at myself, a bit.
I glanced down, toward my chest. The little red light there was flickering, as if keeping time with my pounding heart.
“So what you’re saying is... that stuff got out of the ‘coffin’ and turned into this body?”
Not long after I emerged from my bath, I was surprised to find Shinichi-san and the others already arriving home from school. Rather than heading for their own rooms like they usually did, though, they called everyone to the living room and presented their hypothesis. Specifically, that this female body of mine was created by that amorphous stuff from the coffin. If nothing else, it had the advantage of solving several mysteries at once, including where the goo had gone and why I was suddenly a girl.
“We don’t have any real proof, but Petralka’s at the castle now investigating the possibility,” Shinichi-san said.
“Huh, all right,” I answered, and nodded. Shinichi-san sort of blinked at me. “What?”
“You... don’t seem very surprised.”
“Oh,” I said with a bit of a smile. True, the idea might have been surprising, but I had already seen that light in my chest. It sure looked an awful lot like the red glow that had been floating in that gelatin. In fact, I had been thinking along lines not too different from Shinichi-san’s hypothesis myself.
“I’m kind of impressed, though,” Minori-san said. “Seeing that slime take on a form like this. If I didn’t know better, I might think it was a real human body.”
“It has the right body temperature, and the skin feels very human. Want to touch it?” I said, holding out a hand to Minori-san. She stopped for a second, startled—but then took my hand.
“Wow,” she said, “it does feel real.”
“How about you, Shinichi-san? Want to cop a feel? My chest is right here.”
“What?!”
I got his eyes to just about bug out of his head when I reached for the collar of my shirt. He knew, theoretically, that I was still a guy at heart, but he reacted to me just as if I was a girl, and the incongruity made me laugh.
“Quit it, I’m serious,” Shinichi-san said with a long sigh. He tended to have the edge on me in our daily life, so it would be a shame not to take advantage of a chance to tweak him a little. “Anyway, Hikaru-san, as far as why that Slime thing turned into you, I have to think it has something to do with that choker Romilda gave you.”
“Can’t really think of anything else,” I said. That was about the only thing that had changed recently.
Shinichi-san’s theory was that the gelatinous stuff had always gone along with the choker; that it was a way of, for example, making a body double for someone. The goo copied the physical form of whoever put on the choker, then could be controlled remotely by the person in question, like an avatar in an online game. And because one person’s consciousness obviously couldn’t control two bodies at once, the original body remained asleep.
“So I’m thinking that if you take the choker off, maybe your consciousness will go back to your real body.”
That would be the natural conclusion, sure enough. I could go back to my own body. That should make me happy.
So why didn’t it?
“That’s...” I just couldn’t lose myself with joy.
“Hikaru-san?” Shinichi-san sort of half stood up from the sofa, looking at me, puzzled. I guess he had been on his way to go to the room—my room—where my male body was sleeping to take off the choker. But my show of hesitation stopped him. Minori-san, Myusel, and Elvia all looked at me in surprise. I could see why they would think it was strange. Wouldn’t a person normally be eager to get back to their own body? But...
If I go back to my male body...
Would I still be able to share the same closeness with Elvia, like we’d had in the bath today? Different gender. Same gender. That one thing made all the difference
